Amazon's New KDP Reports Suck

 It was 3 or 4 years ago when Amazon first unveiled the "beta" of their KDP reports.  And they were...meh.  Predictably when the "beta" finally went online, it was not really changed much.  Which stinks, because those reports are not really all that useful.  The main problem is that these new reports lump all of your "orders" together, instead of separating free and paid.  Which if you have no free books (or paid books) is fine, but if you have a mix, then it's not helpful.   In the picture below, it says 15 units ordered, but almost all of those units are free, not paid.  So it's really misleading about how much I would actually get paid.

And the royalties box there includes Kindle Unlimited stuff, so who even knows how accurate that is?  Not even Amazon really understands how that's calculated, so that number is just a vague estimate, thus not very helpful.

And the retro interface makes it almost impossible to use the reports on a phone or tablet.  To see how many paid orders I have, I need to use those filter boxes at the top of the screen.  On a PC it's pretty easy, but on a phone or tablet, it is really annoying.

For a while they still let you use the old-style reports if you want.  Those are better in that you can see at a glance how many actual paid sales you have and how many free.  The only good thing about the new reports is it shows you the titles.  Still, I'd rather use the old ones and see at a glance how much money I'm getting than have to dick around with filters. 

There's really no excuse to take 3-4 years and then come out with something that was basically outdated in 2002.  In the year 2022, you'd think making your reports easy to use with phones and tablets (including Amazon Fire tablets) would be a priority.  But nah.  That it's been so long with so little improvement is a problem with Amazon in general.  They don't have competent people and they don't listen to users.

I know other writers besides myself hate this new format, but Amazon doesn't care.  Like with most bureaucracies, some bloated committee came up with this and that's what they're going to stick with.  Users will just get used to it, like all those bad Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on updates that almost never actually improve anything.

You don't like it, whaddaya gonna do about it, tough guy?  Yeah, didn't think so.